Wednesday, April 23, 2014

I started out in personal computing with a soldering iron in my hand - then along came the radio shack model 1 - it was enthralled... All that computing power on my desk.

Now i run into a Raspberry pi and it is a little dynamo - I have it right now installing mysql . I have installed apache, and have had it updating Xively with the %busy variables for a day or two now. Even have a Arduino mini sending some data over. Whew - lots of Goggling and lots of cut and paste.

It is exciting to see the Pi really busy - it is more fun trying to keep the little green bar in the bottom right corner pegged at 100%.

Been playing with the Arduino for a year or two now - fun, but a lot of wires and a lot of scratching my head figuring out how to stuff all that code into it...

Goal is to
1) Document all this
2) Get something connected to the Arduino (temp and/or humidity and/or Barometer) Sending it all up to Xively and saving it locally.
3) Build some kind of page to display it on a local browser & smartphone

In the very near future hook up some nrf24l01s to some Arduinos and put out in the Yard , basement all over the house... You get the idea.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

In spite of a severe cold - or probably because of it I decided that I would play with my pi.

The goal is to get the weather information from my Weather Station inside and send it out to the internet of things someplace. I have had it running in the past - but it invloved me leaving the desktop running and eating way too much power.

I have seen a lot of elaborate lashups using spi and whatnot hooked into the pi and the nrf24l01 - but I figured that I would do it different. Let the Pi do what id does best and the Arduino do what it does best.
The pie is a Unix computer and will do the heavy lifting since it has internet connectivity built in and lots of ways to display the data or send it out to one of the IOT cloud servers.

The Arduino because of its robust pin protection and scads of code to talk to the nrf24l01.
Goals
1) Run the Pi from a hard drive. I have seen lots of posts of sd card failures after a while. They have a limited R/W Life. Plus I have a bunch of old hard drives.

2) Plug the Arduino into the Pi and run the Arduino IDE there. This keeps me from having to run all over the house and finding various things to get a sd card reader set up and into one of my computers. It is so much better to keep it all in once place.

The key to all this is a Powered USB hub - it has everything plugged into it and powers the whole show. I found one at newegg that has 7 ports and an on off switch. Keyboard and mouse go in the end - everything else goes in the top - to reboot a locked pi without dealing without unplugging a USB - there is that switch - very convenient. The PC has a hundred watt power supply and uses a lot of power spinning up 3.5 terabytes of hard drive storage. The power plug for the hub is 10 watts, very efficient.

I won't bore you with the details - others have already done an excellent job of documenting what to do.

Setting up the PI - I used Berryboot since it has an option to install directly on a hard drive. My settings include booting to a desktop and enabling SSH,